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Innovation key to province’s ambitious agricultural goals

Farming sector expects Victoria to address issues like carbon taxes, competition and the creation of a long-term strategy

Retired greenhouse grower Linda Delli Santi says the provincial carbon tax, which cost about $50,000 a year, ate into any profits made by her five-acre greenhouse in south Langley.

Photograph by: Jenelle Schneider
, Vancouver Sun

If you ask retired greenhouse grower Linda Delli Santi what she misses most about farming, she would say it’s the smell of her tomatoes and bell peppers and seeing bins full of fresh vegetables after a day of picking.

What she doesn’t miss is waking up at 3 a.m. to check the greenhouse boiler, or climbing up and down ladders during the workday. She also doesn’t miss having to pay the provincial carbon tax, which she says cost about $50,000 a year and ate into any profits made by her five-acre greenhouse in south Langley.

“We’re not talking small money. It’s big,” says Delli Santi, who is now the executive director of the BC Greenhouse Growers Association.

It appears Delli Santi isn’t the only food producer in B.C. to suffer from the carbon tax. According to the BC Agriculture Council, the carbon tax has added about $45 million in direct annual costs to food production since it was implemented in 2008.

It’s things like the carbon tax, as well as issues such as competition and innovation, that food producers say need to be addressed by the B.C. Ministry of Agriculture if they are to reach the province’s goal of generating $14 billion in revenue by 2017.

Agriculture Minister Norm Letnick says his ministry is trying. The agriculture sector makes $10.9 billion a year, and the province has a $66-million budget for working with the industry.

The ministry recently agreed to the framework for Growing Forward 2, the second five-year policy that co-ordinates federal, provincial and territorial agriculture policies. While the distribution of funds still needs to be negotiated, Letnick says B.C. should receive $110 million from Growing Forward 2 over the next five years. Unlike the previous Growing Forward, more dollars will be shifted from risk management to innovation. Market expansion into countries such as China and Japan is also a top priority, Letnick says.

“If you innovate, you become more productive. More productive means costs go down, and you can also innovate to increase markets,” he says. “As market shares increase, volumes increase, so cost of production per unit goes down. It also opens up a whole set of opportunities for revenue generation.”

Letnick says the ministry is looking at programs such as the development of alternatives to pesticides, technologies that can disrupt the mating of pests, and ways to increase the shelf life of wines. Funding is also being offered to fruit growers to help them replant low-value orchards with high-demand fruit varieties.

Reg Ens, executive director of the BC Agriculture Council, says the investments in innovation are all good, but he says more needs to be done to get British Columbians to buy local produce instead of imports that are often cheaper.

“We hear from consumers that they want sustainability, they want quality, they want producers and farmers to invest in providing top-end types of products,” he says. “Yet when they get to the retail shelf, they’re all about the lowest price.”

Letnick says the Buy Local program launched earlier this year is one of the solutions. The program allows growers, producers, co-ops and farmers’ markets to apply for between $5,000 and $100,000 for marketing that encourages people to buy local.

Ens says the Buy Local program is “a great start, but it’s a bit piecemeal.” As 98 per cent of B.C. farms are small, and family-owned and operated, Ens says it’s just too hard to keep costs at a level low enough to compete with imported produce.

The carbon tax doesn’t help matters.

Greenhouse growers received $7.6 million this year to offset tax costs, and the carbon tax will be reviewed by the government next year. But Delli Santi says the uncertainty about the future of the tax is discouraging some growers from investing in increasing productivity.

“When you’re making business decisions, you need more certainty than ‘Maybe we’ll get a rebate,’” she says. “Members will not make business investment decisions in their facilities, or in expansion or upgrades, when they don’t know for certain what’s going to happen along the way.”

Ens says growers also want the ministry to address the cut in extension service agents — field officers who farmers can phone whenever they have questions or who visit people’s farms when they have a problem.

Lana Popham, the NDP agriculture critic, says provincial extension services have been gutted in the past 10 years, with the most recent cut being the 2010 loss of the province’s organic produce agent.

“When you cut something as basic as extension services, I think the priorities are wrong,” says Popham.

“To have an extension officer in place, it’s about $85,000 full-time per employee, and if you look at how much is coming from Growing Forward, not very much of that would enable us to have extension services.”

Ens says what’s most important for the future of the industry, though, is a long-term government food strategy so growers know what to expect 20, even 50 years down the line.

He says changes in government, changes in budgets, and changes in regulations make it difficult for growers to plan.

“We realize that we live in a time of limited resources and want to not frivolously use them, but agriculture is a long-term type strategy,” Ens says. “Right now we operate in five-year federal-provincial agreements. All that politics doesn’t allow for long-term, efficient planning.”

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